“Maybe I can help,” said Arden. All three of us spun around to face her. She grinned, but she looked more than a little strained around the edges. “Hey, Cat Queen, your buddy told me some fun stories about your version of the world. You want to tell me how much truth he was putting on the table?”
“Did he tell you that you were meant to be Queen in the Mists, not a courier for Golden Shore?”
Arden nodded. “He did. He also told me that in your Faerie, Oleander got away.”
“I never knew her,” said Ginevra. “But the damage she did still echoes through your Kingdom, and may never quite be repaired.”
“He was real startled when I told him that in this Faerie, Oleander died after she offed my parents.” Arden’s grin faded, replaced by cold, stony displeasure. “In your Faerie, people still argue about whether or not she did it. They discuss, like my parents are just a footnote in an unclear history.”
“What happened here?” asked Ginevra.
“My brother and I found Oleander standing over their bodies. Nolan screamed, and when he ran, she ran after him. So I opened a gate so that he could get away, and when she grabbed the back of his shirt, I closed it again, with her arms on the other side.” Arden’s expression never wavered. “She didn’t die from that, of course. She fell down and screamed and bled a lot, but there was an earthquake, everyone was screaming a lot. So I took her knife—the knife she used to kill my parents—and I slit her murdering throat. Then we ran for Golden Shore, because someone had wanted our whole family dead, and I knew they could accuse me of breaking the Law, and it wasn’t safe for us to stay in the Mists anymore. Do you really expect me to believe that a Faerie where Oleander lived was the better world?”
“You’re free there, not confined to someone else’s Kingdom,” said Ginevra.
“Freedom’s overrated.” Arden waved her hand, opening a circle in the air, back to the field where we’d first arrived. “Go ahead and do what you need to do, but be sure you know that you’re not breaking any enchantment on me or on my brother without our permission. If you try it, I’ll end you myself.”
Ginevra glanced at the open window on the outside world, then back at Arden. “If you hurt us in any way, Tybalt will take you apart.”
“Oh, he’s made that perfectly clear,” said Arden. “I’m not going to cut you in half. I only did that once, and I had very good reasons. Go on.”
“She saved me from the Queen’s dungeon,” I said. “I trust her.”
Then I stepped through the circle, into the field on the other side.
I might have said I trusted her, but I didn’t relax until I was actually in the field, with all my limbs still safely attached to my body. I took a few more steps, then turned, looking back through the circle into the hall. Grianne rolled her eyes and said something I didn’t hear. Then she did a standing backflip, vanishing into thin air. A few seconds later, she and her Merry Dancers stepped out of nothingness to join me. I looked at her.
“Candela don’t need gates,” she said, with a small shrug.
Ginevra was still in the hall with Arden. She backed up to get a running start, looking nervous. Then she leapt, and was suddenly a small orange-and-white cat instead of a woman. She soared through the circle, landing neatly in front of me, as Arden snorted with amusement and closed her hand.
The gate snapped shut. The cat looked up at me and meowed imperiously.
“Er, hello,” I said.
The cat sat up straighter, and then, with a rush of river lupine and limoncello, Ginevra was standing where the cat had been, pushing her hair out of her eyes with one hand.
“Sorry for the dramatics,” she said. “I really didn’t want to get parts of me cut off.”
“I don’t think she’d do that,” I said. “Oleander was a special case.” I’d have done the same, or worse, to anyone who hurt my parents and threatened my sister. That didn’t mean I’d be willing to do it to just anyone who got on my nerves. I pulled the key Ginevra had given me out of my pocket. “Am I supposed to do something special with this?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I just know you’ve used it before.”
“In another version of Faerie, when I was someone else.”
“Yes.”
“Right.” I held out my free hand. “If you don’t think it’ll get you in trouble with the overprotective brute squad later, I should probably check that memory. And that means I need blood.”
Ginevra nodded. She tapped the tip of my finger with her claw, and there was pain, bright and swift, followed by blood, welling up like a promise of more pain to come. I barely flinched, only stuck my finger in my mouth and swallowed. No matter what happened from there, I was going to come away a lot more comfortable with blood magic than I’d ever been, or planned to be, before.
The taste of blood blossomed on my tongue, and the red veil descended.
I am standing in the ballroom at Shadowed Hills, and there is blood everywhere. It smears the walls, it drips down all around me. Tybalt is on the floor in a crumpled heap, being tended by an Ellyllon woman, as I face someone I have never seen before.
She is tall and slender and sharp as a thorn, with hair in a hundred shades of pink and red and eyes the color of rose pollen. She looks at me like she hates me too much to stand, and the memory gives me a name for her: Luna.
She holds the key in one hand. I must have given it to her. “This belonged to my grandmother,” she says.
“Which one?” I ask.
Luna’s head snaps up, eyes narrowing, as if that were the worst question I could ever have asked. Not telling me what I said wrong, she shoves the key into the air between us. The bottom half vanishes, like it has been placed in a lock I can’t see.
“My debts are paid,” she says, and turns the key sharply to the left, pulling at the same time.
The memory broke there, but I nodded, clinging to the red veil to force it to continue tinting the world as I took a step forward, holding out the key like I was going to slide it into a lock. Some of the curls and twists in its engravings were sharp, and I rubbed my thumb along them until the skin split and I was rubbing blood onto the key itself, feeding it into the metal. The woman in my memory—Luna—hadn’t needed blood, but whatever she’d been, she wasn’t Dóchas Sidhe. All I had was in the blood. It always had been.
“My debts are paid,” I said, almost liltingly, and shoved the bloody key into the air in front of me.
For a moment, I was afraid it wouldn’t work. For a moment, I was afraid all the sympathetic magic in the world wouldn’t be enough to let me do what the woman had done, that her opening had been powered by a magic of her own. But that’s the way enchanted items are made, sometimes: people push magic through them so many times that it just sort of sticks and flavors them, like infusing honey into your tea. The key hit resistance. I pushed harder.
The bottom half of the key vanished into the air, the key itself feeling as if it had been seated in an invisible keyhole. I twisted it hard to the left, pulling it toward me at the same time.
The key didn’t budge from whatever impossible keyhole I had pushed it into, and what felt like the heaviest door in creation slowly shifted toward me, revealing a hole in the world.